Tag: delegate

A client of mine recently contacted me with a number of Exchange related problems. Various company Executives were seeing duplicate and vanishing appointments in their Entourage Calendar. Most of the company Execs were on Macs using Entourage 2008, while their assistants were using Outlook 2003/2007 on Windows based PC’s will full delegation rights.

After examining the Exchange entries, it appears the duplicates were being created solely by the Entourage clients. Further examination of the Mac clients revealed that they also had the Sync Services Enabled for Entourage.

Entourage Preferences - Sync Services

By disabling the Sync Services for Entourage, it eliminated duplications from the corrupted truth database. Unfortunately, some of the Execs wanted Entourage data to continue to sync with their .Mac accounts, despite the same information being available from any web browser via OWA. This required fixing the somewhat buggy Sync Service.

The Sync Service works as an intermediate between your various applications/devices and the data they contain. When an application like Entourage syncs with the Sync Service, the data is copied from Entourage to the truth database. At that point, other applications like iCal further synchronize the data with the truth database.

When prompted with the “Replace, Replace, Merge” dialogue, since we select Entourage to be the primary source of data, make sure to choose “Replace Sync Services items with Entourage items”.

From what I have experienced, synchronizing an Exchange linked Entourage client with a .Mac is frequently problematic and I do not recommend it at the time this article was written. If you must use this functionality, make sure to always make additions/changes/deletions from one machine and with a single application. You should then give some time for synchronization to occur before using another machine/app. As you can imagine, this can be an issue for users with delegates constantly changing Exchange data from another machine!